Highlights of GAO-11-675, a report to the Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives
Summary
Each year organized groups of professional shoplifters steal or fraudulently obtain billions of dollars in merchandise to resell in an activity known as organized retail crime (ORC). These stolen goods can also be sold on online marketplaces, a practice known as “e-fencing.” GAO was asked to assess ORC and e-fencing. This report addresses:
(1) types of efforts that select retailers, state and local law enforcement, and federal agencies are undertaking to combat ORC;
(2) the extent to which tools or mechanisms exist to facilitate collaboration and information sharing among these ORC stakeholders; and
(3) steps that select online marketplaces have taken to combat ORC and e-fencing, and additional actions, if any, retailers and law enforcement think may enhance these efforts. GAO reviewed retail-industry documentation, such as reports and surveys, and academic studies related to ORC and efforts to combat it. GAO also interviewed representatives from four major retail associations and five individual retailers, selected for their knowledge of and efforts to combat ORC, as well as eight local law enforcement officials involved in the development of ORC information sharing networks, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. The results are not generalizable, but provided insights on activities related to ORC.
What the GAO Found
Retailers collaborate with law enforcement agencies to detect and deter retail theft and investigate potential ORC cases, and federal agencies are taking steps to better track their involvement. Stopping ORC begins with retailers, which have invested in new technologies and personnel to deter and investigate ORC. These investigations are often conducted in concert with local law enforcement, which generally must balance ORC investigative demands with other offenses — including violent crime. Federal agencies, including FBI and ICE, also work major ORC cases in conjunction with retailers and local law enforcement. These agencies do not have dedicated ORC resources, but both have implemented recent efforts to enhance tracking of ORC cases within their case management systems, including developing a program code to better track involvement in ORC cases. Such tracking is intended, in part, to improve data collection and reporting of case information and help inform management resource decisions.
Emerging regional networks are facilitating information sharing among ORC stakeholders including retailers and law enforcement, but limitations were cited with the existing national database. Officials from all eight of the local law enforcement entities GAO interviewed have, with retail partners, established regional networks in recent years to facilitate information sharing among stakeholders and identify linkages between connected retail theft cases. A national database, which was created by the retail community with input provided by the FBI based on a legislative mandate, also exists to share ORC information. However, all five retailers GAO interviewed reported concerns related to the database’s functionality, such as missing analytics to help retailers or law enforcement identify trends. In April 2011, the system was acquired by a company with experience managing large information-sharing databases in several major industries. According to the owner, when the new system becomes operational in the summer of 2011, it will include a series of enhancements intended to address the key concerns identified. It is too soon to tell to what extent retailers will expend resources to utilize an enhanced national ORC database.
Leading online marketplaces have taken steps to combat ORC and e-fencing, but it is unclear if additional federal action would further deter this practice. eBay, the largest online marketplace, has recently taken steps to deter e-fencing, but varying business models and available resources may impact efforts of other online marketplaces. Efforts by eBay are designed to make it more responsive to requests for information from both retailers and law enforcement, both of which usually need seller information to link stolen merchandise to specific people. Retail and law enforcement stakeholders GAO interviewed identified two options — both imposing restrictions on sellers using online marketplaces — they felt could help combat ORC. However, these options would require legislative changes to implement, and it is unknown what deterrent effect the options may have on ORC and e-fencing.
GAO is not making any recommendations in this report.
Warning, a television re-broadcast of a PBS Frontline program, investigates the roots of the financial crisis
“We didn’t truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market,” says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country’s key economic power brokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. “They were totally opposed to it,” Born says. “That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?”
In The Warning, re-airing Tuesday, June 14,veteran Frontlineproducer Michael Kirk unearths the hidden history of the nation’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all, he finds Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multi-trillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.
“I didn’t know Brooksley Born,” says former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, a member of President Clinton’s powerful Working Group on Financial Markets. “I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable.” Levitt explains how the other principals of the Working Group — former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin — convinced him that Born’s attempt to regulate the risky derivatives market could lead to financial turmoil, a conclusion he now believes was “clearly a mistake.”
Born’s battle behind closed doors was epic, Kirk finds. The members of the president’s Working Group vehemently opposed regulation — especially when proposed by a Washington outsider like Born.
“I walk into Brooksley’s office one day; the blood has drained from her face,” says Michael Greenberger, a former top official at the CFTC who worked closely with Born. “She’s hanging up the telephone; she says to me: ‘That was [former Assistant Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers. He says, “You’re going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II.” … [He says he has] 13 bankers in his office who informed him of this. Stop, right away. No more.’”
Greenspan, Rubin and Summers ultimately prevailed on Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation of derivatives. “Born faced a formidable struggle pushing for regulation at a time when the stock market was booming,” Kirk says. “Alan Greenspan was the maestro, and both parties in Washington were united in a belief that the markets would take care of themselves.”
Now, with many of the same men who shut down Born in key positions in the Obama administration, The Warning reveals the complicated politics that led to this crisis and what it may say about current attempts to prevent another one.
“It’ll happen again if we don’t take the appropriate steps,” Born warns. “There will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap over and over until we learn from experience.”
I would like to thank the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation for this wonderful and unanticipated honor. John F. Kennedy has been one of my heroes for more than 50 years, and to receive an award for courage in his name is truly thrilling and truly humbling.
Like all dutiful daughters, I called Dad on Father’s Day. Thanks to the iPhone’s 3.0 update that includes the application, Celestial Calls, I was able to reach him with little effort.
He wasn’t surprised at my call because ever since he died in 1958, he’s kept his eyes on me. I know this because there are times I feel his presence. Mostly, I’m happy he’s lurking, especially if I’m being honored, thanked, or otherwise celebrated. If I’m very quiet, I can just about make out, “Way to go, Princess.”
Other times, when I’m engaged in activities that he may have frowned upon when alive; i.e. lying, cheating, or taking a Gentile for a second husband, I pray (a longtime earth-to-heaven communication technique) that Dad discretely looks the other way.
On my Father’s Day call, Dad picked up after a few rings and said, “So nice to hear from you, Princess.”
“Do you have an iPhone, too?” I asked, imagining he must have a similar device for our unusual chat to occur.
“No, just a regular rotary phone,” Dad said. “Nothing fancy.”
“So where did I catch you?” I asked. (When Apple brings video chat to the iPhone, these types of questions will be irrelevant.)
“The Pool Room. Where else? You remember the guys from Division Street? They’re all up here now.”
In the background, I could hear the clinking of billiard balls, the TV with Jack Brickhouse announcing the Cubs game, and shouts of ‘goniff!‘ from male voices I assumed were at card tables.
“Sure, I remember the Pool Room. Are you all still smoking?” I asked. I thought about those clouds that greeted me whenever I went to fetch Dad home for supper.
“This is Heaven,” Dad said. “We get to do what we want. And we don’t have to worry about second-hand smoke killing anyone. We’re already dead!” He laughed at his inside joke.
I heard chomping. “Are you eating, Dad?” Scorn rising in my voice.
“Corned beef on rye, coleslaw …”
“But Dad,” I said, “your diabetes, your …
He interrupted with another laugh, “Princess, enough already.”
“Oh yeah, Heaven,” I said. “Listen, I’ve been trying to think of a Father’s Day gift, but you understand postage would be prohibitive.”
“Princess, you don’t need to buy me anything. Your book about me was enough.”
“Dad, to be honest, it wasn’t only about you. It was about all of our lives on Division Street – you, me, Mom, Ronnie.”
“I know, I know, everybody loved it.”
“You all read it?” I asked.
“I did a book signing,” Dad said. I was certain he was rolling his eyes at my naiveté. “Remember Stuart Brent Books in Chicago?” he continued. “When it left Michigan Avenue, it opened up here. We resurrect only independent booksellers. I was quite a hit.”
Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it is the British Library’s first exhibition to explore science fiction through literature, film, illustration and sound. It challenges visitors’ perceptions of the genre by uncovering gems of the Library’s collections from the earliest science fiction manuscripts to the latest best-selling novels Guest-curated by Andy Sawyer, Director of Science Fiction Studies MA at the University of Liverpool, the exhibition will trace the development of the genre from True History by Lucian of Samosata written in the 2nd century AD to the recent writings of Cory Doctorow and China Miéville, showing how science fiction has turned from a niche into a global phenomenon.
Visitors to the exhibition — on view until September 25th — will discover an interactive space based on ‘other worlds’ presented by science fiction. These will include: Alien Worlds; Future Worlds; Parallel Worlds; Virtual Worlds; the End of the World and the Perfect World. Each area will draw on a variety of exhibits, multi-media interactives, film and sound to experience new surroundings and ask questions such as: ‘who are we?’, ‘why are we here?’, ‘what is reality?’ and ‘what does the future hold?’
A few exhibition highlights include: • Thomas More’s, Utopia (1516). More coined the word ‘utopia’ which became the name of the ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in his book. Despite modern connotations of the word it is widely accepted that the society he describes was not actually his own ‘perfect society’. Rather he wished to use the contrast between the imaginary land’s unusual political ideas and the chaotic politics of his own day as a platform from which to discuss social issues in Europe.
• Lucian, True History (1647 edition). Originally dating from the 2nd century, this story depicts a group of adventurers setting out on a sea voyage — they visit a number of fantastical lands and, lifted up by a giant waterspout, they are deposited on the Moon. True History has been described as ‘the first known text that could be called science fiction’. Literary critics see the text as a satire against contemporary and ancient sources, which quotes fantastic and mythical events as truth.
The 40-mile stretch of Interstate 95 that serves as Rhode Island’s transportation backbone is falling apart, despite several ambitious projects by the state to relieve congestion and improve safety on the well-traveled route between New York and Boston. Conditions on one I-95 bridge are bad enough that heavy trucks must find a different route to cross the Pawtucket River. A major viaduct in Providence needs replacing.
The needs are piling up. A recent study shows that Rhode Island must spend about $300 million more a year just to keep its current roads and bridges in good repair. That is twice as much as the state typically spends.
There is an obvious way to pay for the needed upkeep — make Interstate 95 into a toll road as it crosses the state. But that idea may be illegal. Ever since the interstate system was built, Congress has prohibited states from charging tolls on highways built with federal money. The constraint posed fewer problems when transportation money was easier to find. But now almost every other source of road funds is drying up, and several states are eyeing the possibility of collecting tolls on interstates that drivers now use for free.
Rhode Island is one. The state, says Michael Lewis, the director of the Rhode Island Department of Transportation, is running out of alternatives. “The tolling option,” he says, “is what we think of as the least painful, most equitable, least impacting option to raise additional revenues that can be invested back in states’ infrastructure.”
Virtually every state, like Rhode Island, faces a funding crunch for roads. The federal piggy bank for highway maintenance, a major funding source for states, is nearly empty. The bulk of its money is raised through the federal gas tax, which has not been increased since 1993. Despite several moves by Congress in the last three years to replenish the Highway Trust Fund, that money is expected to run out again by late 2012.
The consensus on Capitol Hill, where Congress is drafting a new highway funding bill, is that the new highway plan will have less money than in the past for transportation. That puts further pressure on states to find other sources for road repairs. States have been hesitant to raise their own gas taxes, too, and their poor fiscal conditions leave them with few options for finding money elsewhere in their budgets.
In Rhode Island, which has one of the highest state gas taxes in the country, the governor has tried to find more money for fixing roads by calling for increased vehicle registration fees and by pushing lower borrowing levels, which would free up money now spent on interest.
Exception to the rule
Adding tolls is nearly as unpopular with the public as raising the federal gas tax, but states are betting that motorists will pay higher fees if they get specific improvements in return.
Under current law, states are allowed to toll interstates if the roads had tolls before they became part of the national network, which is why so many states in the Northeast already charge tolls for driving on I-95. They also are allowed to put tolls on new roads that are not part of the Interstate Highway System. States can even add new carpool lanes to existing interstates, and charge money to use the faster lanes. But they generally cannot put tolls on previously toll-free interstate stretches built with federal money.
The human genome sequence has been fully completed for a decade now and the price of full genome sequencing is dropping precipitously. Many believe that with these developments, a new era of personalized medicine is about to hit full speed. Personalized medicine is essentially “the use of genetic susceptibility or pharmacogenetic testing to tailor an individual’s preventive care or drug therapy,” although some definitions also include the development of patient outcomes research, health information technology, and care delivery models.
Put more simply, it means the development of medicines and therapies tailored to patients’ unique genetic traits and risks. The field is evolving rapidly but many hurdles still remain. Individually tailored drugs based on a patient’s genetic makeup are far off, and the cost of developing drugs for genetic subpopulations with largely similar genetic traits for one or more diseases hinders developments in this arena. Similarly, the lack of standards surrounding direct to-consumer genetic tests and the lack of robust, large-scale genomic data for many diseases and conditions are additional hurdles.
Nevertheless, personalized medicine is making its way into the mainstream. Estimates by PricewaterhouseCoopers indicate that the market for personalized medicine, currently a $232 billion industry, will grow at a rate of 11 percent annually. Personalized medicine is also making serious strides in the pharmaceutical industry with drugs like the colon cancer drug Erbitux, which is most effective in patients with a certain genetic mutation.
Personalized medicine also has the potential to rein in rising health care costs. For instance, physicians can better prevent adverse drug reactions by using genetic information to calibrate the ideal dosage of the blood-thinning drug Warfarin for an individual patient. This alone could prevent 85,000 serious bleeding cases and 17,000 strokes, and save the health care system $1.1 billion annually.
But the health care and scientific communities will still have to answer important questions about who will have access to these new medical advancements as they develop. Health disparities persist between different groups for various reasons including access to care, lifestyle factors, socioeconomic status, and genetics. Studies indicate that minorities have less access to health care and generally receive a lower quality of care. Studies show that African Americans have lower incidence of breast cancer than white women, for example, but suffer greater mortality.
Heart disease is widespread among minorities and a leading killer in the African-American community. Personalized medicine can potentially alleviate these discrepancies since it could allow physicians to prescribe medication that treats the disease more effectively. African American women suffer from a more aggressive form of breast cancer that tends to be estrogen resistant, for example. Profiling the genes of the tumor and the genes of the patient could allow a doctor to prescribe the most effective drug regimen.
Yet certain issues regarding racial and ethnic health disparities need to be addressed in order for personalized medicine to offer the greatest benefit to all. This paper examines these issues in detail and then offers some ethical guidelines for policymakers to consider, among them:
• There must be a frank discussion of the social and methodological appropriateness of using race or ethnicity as disease proxies.
• Genetic variation research and clinical trials must systematically incorporate such discussions into their individual study designs and the research itself.
• We cannot ignore structural inequalities in access to health care and in fact should seek to reduce them through research that looks at social, environmental, and behavioral contributions to health status as well as research on the outcomes of different care delivery models for different populations.
In the pages that follow we will demonstrate why these proposed ethical guidelines are essential to the development of personalized medicine in our country.
Paralysis, strangulation, derangement — these are just a few of the misdeeds of the plant kingdom as chronicled by award-winning author Amy Stewart in Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities. And now, something wicked this way comes.
It’s mayhem under glass, as the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park has transformed its Special Exhibits Gallery into an eerie Victorian garden full of Mother Nature’s most appalling creations. Building on the fascinating plant portraits in Stewart’s book, the Conservatory introduces visitors to living examples of dozens of infamous plants that have left their mark on history and claimed many an unfortunate victim.
Wicked Plants: Botanical Rogues & Assassins will be on view through October 30, 2011.
“Naturally, there’s nothing like a good crime to pique people’s interest in plants,” says Brent Dennis, Director of the Conservatory. Opened in 1879, the wood and glass greenhouse is the oldest existing conservatory in North America; the Conservatory of Flowers is a spectacular living museum of rare and beautiful tropical plants under glass. From Borneo to Bolivia, the 1,750 species of plants at the Conservatory represent unusual flora from more than 50 countries around the world. Immersive displays in five galleries include the lowland tropics, highland tropics, aquatic plants, potted plants and special exhibits. Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon’s Army & Other Diabolical Insectsby Amy Stewart
As visitors enter the exhibition, they find themselves in a mysterious, untended yard behind a ramshackle old Victorian home. Peeking through the window, it’s clear that a crime has just taken place. A man is slumped over on a table, a goblet in his lifeless hand, as the lady of the house flees in the background. Crows caw, and a rusty gate creaks. In the overgrown garden, moss covered statues rise up out of an unruly thicket of alluring plants. Beautiful flowers and glistening berries bewitch the eye, but consider yourself warned — these plants have such names as deadly nightshade, poison hemlock and white snakeroot.
The exhibition features over 30 species of wicked plants from those with famously scandalous histories to those that grow “innocently” in millions of gardens and homes today. Visitors can enjoy corresponding excerpts from Stewart’s book full of bloodcurdling tales and fascinating facts on signs throughout the gallery.
“I’m very drawn to storytelling as a writer, and I love it that the plant world is full of such drama and intrigue,” says Stewart. ” Plants nourish us, they feed us, and they provide the very oxygen we breathe — but they also have to defend themselves. I hope people will come away from the exhibit with a new level of respect for the power of the plant kingdom — but I also hope they will be entertained. The Conservatory exhibit staff turns out to have a very wicked sense of humor, and they’ve created an exhibit beyond anything I could have imagined.”
“I never saw so many strong men sobbing at once.” Nancy Banks Smith, The Guardian
Point of View, a PBS program, is showing an acclaimed film on the Tuesday, June 21, 2011. We’ve reproduced the description of making the film from the blog of the filmakers:
Making Kings Of Pastry
Award winning filmmakers and partners, D A Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, (Don’t Look Back, The War Room) take us behind-the-scenes with exclusive first time access to France’s oldest and most prestigious pastry competition — the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France — an epic three-day test of passion, perseverance, artistry, and technical skill. The blue, white and red striped collar worn on the jackets of the winners is more than the ultimate recognition for every pastry chef — it is a dream and an obsession. Similar to the Olympics, the contest takes place every four years and requires that the chefs not only have extraordinary talent and nerves of steel but also a lot of luck.
Director Chris Hegedus grew up with pastry in her genes. Like most of the chefs in Kings of Pastry, her grandfather apprenticed at 16 with a baker in Europe. He immigrated to New York City and in the 1920s he opened two, elegant confectionary ‘tea rooms’ where he created his signature chocolates and ice creams. Her great-grandfather was chef for one of New York City’s most famous German restaurants and cooked for the Roosevelt family during the summers at their home on Campobello Island. On the other side of the family was Chris’s Hungarian grandmother, whose reputation for delicious cooking and baking was famous throughout her Eastern European community in Bethlehem, Pa. “When other kids in the 1950s were eating Betty Crocker birthday cakes mixed from a box I would be sent a ten-layer hazelnut ‘Dobos Torte’ sponge cake with a caramel filling, mocha buttercream icing and a burnt-sugar glaze. Every year we would count how many layers Grammy would make for the cake. She lived until she was 94 so we felt blessed!”
OVERVIEW from the Pew Center for People and the Press
The public offers a mixed reaction to a proposal to change Medicare into a program that would give future participants a credit toward purchasing private health insurance coverage: 41% oppose such a change, 36% favor it, and nearly a quarter (23%) have no opinion either way. Despite this even division of opinion overall, there is broad, and strong, opposition to the proposal among older Americans, and those who are paying a lot of attention to the issue.
Those ages 50 and older oppose this proposal, which is part of Rep. Paul Ryan’s deficit reduction plan, by a 51% to 29% margin. And this opposition is intense: 42% strongly oppose this kind of change, while only 19% strongly favor it. The same is true among people who say they have heard a lot about this proposal – fully 56% are opposed while 33% are in favor, and strong opposition among this group outweighs strong support by two-to-one (50% vs. 25%).
The latest national poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted May 25-30 among 1,509 adults, finds only modest partisan differences in views of the Medicare proposal. Democrats are slightly more likely to oppose this kind of change than are Republicans (46% vs. 39%), while an identical 35% in both parties are in favor. The ambivalence toward this proposal among Republicans holds across ideological lines. Even among conservative Republicans as many oppose (38%) as favor (34%) this proposal. And among people who say they agree with the Tea Party just 44% support this change, while 36% are opposed.
When it comes to dealing with Medicare, the Democrats have a 44% to 34% edge over the Republicans as the party who can do the best job. Even though this proposed change receives mixed reactions within each party base, most remain loyal to their party on the issue generally. For example, while just 35% of Republicans favor this particular proposal, 70% believe the GOP can do the better job of dealing with Medicare overall. A comparable 75% of Democrats say their party is best suited to handle Medicare, far higher than the 46% who oppose this particular issue. Independents are divided in their assessment, with 40% preferring the Democratic Party, and 33% the Republican Party, on the issue of Medicare.
The V&A in London is presenting the most comprehensive exhibition staged on the Aesthetic Movement in Britain. Prizing the importance of art and the pleasure of beautiful things above all else, it was the first artistic movement to inspire an entire lifestyle.
The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860 – 1900 gathers for the first time many masterpieces in painting together with sculpture, design, furniture and architecture as well as fashion and literature of the era. Aestheticism created an unprecedented public fascination in the lives of artists and the exhibition will explore the dazzling array of personalities in the group including William Morris, James McNeill Whistler, Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and Oscar Wilde.
Aestheticism was a British movement born as a reaction to the art and ideas of the Victorian establishment. The exhibition traces its development from the romantic bohemianism of a small avant-garde circle in the 1860s to a cultural phenomenon, concluding with the final Decadent phase at the end of the 19th century. The style was characterised by a widespread use of motifs such as the lily, the sunflower and the peacock feather, drawing on sources as diverse as Ancient Greek art and modern day Japan. It was at the V&A that scholars first identified and studied the movement.
Sir Mark Jones, Director of the V&A, said: “Art as important for its own sake, beauty to be valued for itself alone — the ideas proposed by the Aesthetic movement are current again today. This exhibition, drawn from a wide range of public and private collections, will be the richest and most complete picture of this extraordinary movement yet.”
The exhibition includes over 250 objects and is set out in four broadly chronological sections spanning the decades from 1860-1900: The Search for a New Beauty, Art for Art’s Sake, Beautiful People and Aesthetic Houses, and Late Flowering Beauty.
The clear artistic ideal that emerged from the confusion of styles in the mid-19th century was the ‘cult of beauty’ that brought together the Pre-Raphaelite bohemians like Rossetti, maverick figures such as Whistler and the painters of grand, classical subjects like Leighton and G. F. Watts. These painters chose unconventional models like Elizabeth Siddal to create an entirely new type of beauty where mood, colour and harmony were more important than the subject.
Summary